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Dedicated to educating current and future generations about Gage’s work and its power to drive contemporary social change.
Dedicated to educating current and future generations about Gage’s work and its power to drive contemporary social change.
Matilda Joslyn Gage (March 24, 1826 – March 18, 1898) was a 19th-century women's suffragist, a Native American rights activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression."
One of the most radical, far-sighted, and articulate early feminists, Matilda Joslyn Gage was deliberately writ
Matilda Joslyn Gage (March 24, 1826 – March 18, 1898) was a 19th-century women's suffragist, a Native American rights activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression."
One of the most radical, far-sighted, and articulate early feminists, Matilda Joslyn Gage was deliberately written out of history after her death in 1898 by an increasingly conservative suffrage movement. Equal in importance to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage is all but unknown today. Work is underway to correct that through the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation.
The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation was established in 2000 when Sally Roesch Wagner, the leading authority on Gage, brought together a diverse network of people with a common goal: to bring this vitally important suffragist back to her rightful place in history.
The Gage home is one of our nation’s most important historical sites. The museum has rooms dedicated to the social justice work of Matilda Joslyn Gage:
The Gage home is one of our nation’s most important historical sites. The museum has rooms dedicated to the social justice work of Matilda Joslyn Gage:
The Gage Center is an educational resource and hub for discussion and dialogue about the human rights issues to which Matilda Joslyn Gage dedicated her life.
“My blood always boils at advice from a man in regard to a family. That, at least, should be the province of woman alone. To say when and how often she chooses to go down into the valley of the shadow of death, to give the world another child, should be hers alone to say.” Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote this in 1881. “The law of motherhood should be entirely under woman’s control,” she maintained in her suffrage newspaper.
If she was alive today, Gage’s blood would be boiling, given the leaked draft of the Supreme Court ruling in the Louisiana abortion case. Calling the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which gave women the right to decide, along with her doctor, whether she would birth in the early stages of pregnancy, "egregiously wrong from the start,” the Republican-appointed Supreme Court looks ready to give states the decision of when and how often women will give the world another child.
Gage wrote in 1868, “down through the Christian centuries to this nineteenth, nowhere has the marital union of the sexes been one in which the woman has had control over her own body.” The religiously-based Comstock laws passed in the 1870’s made it a crime to practice and even share information about birth control and abortion, and Gage witnessed the arrest of three people for selling a birth control manual at a convention in 1878. Signing a petition against these laws, she wrote in 1892: “Unless the American people rouse to instant action we shall soon find our government turned into a monarchy, church, and State united and the people no better than serfs.”
Two years later Comstock threated to arrest anyone who allowed young people to read Gage’s book, Woman, Church and State. It contained “tales of lust” unsuitable for young people to read, he declared, referring to her exposing Catholic priests who were sexually violating children and women, and calling out the existence of sex trafficking in the U.S. Gage responded by calling Comstock a fool and a knave.
Never one to mince words, Gage would no doubt accuse the Supreme Court of a crime against women if the draft exposed today will be their final opinion and they vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, for she wrote, “Enforced motherhood is a crime against the body of the mother and the soul of the child.”
Does Gage have advice for us today? In her first women’s rights speech in 1852, she roused the audience with these words:
“Fear not any attempt to frown down the revolution already commenced; nothing is a more fertile aid of reform, than an attempt to check it; work on!”
In the spirit of Matilda Joslyn Gage, let us work on!
Sally Roesch Wagner, Executive Director
The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation
May 3, 2022
The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation is continuing to practice the strongest COVID measures. To ensure the health of our community, we are requiring everyone to wear masks inside the Center. We are also maintaining six feet distance. Our staff are fully vaccinated and will be wearing masks. We will have a mask available for you when you visit.
